Ohio may not yet be fully cleaned up, but environmental groups and state officials appear unified in their support for another eight years of a far-reaching program to keep working toward that goal.

Voters, however, will get the final say Nov. 4 on whether to continue Clean Ohio, which appears on the ballot as State Issue 2. The program, financed through a bond issue, was approved by 57 percent of Ohio voters in 2000.

This year's bond issue renewal has not produced significant opposition, but supporters are wary of voter misunderstanding and backlash in a troubled economy.

"Our main opposition against Clean Ohio might be the public perception problem," said Alan Melamed, a Clean Ohio campaign manager. "Polls show that almost 70 percent of the people believe that because it's a bond issue, it's a tax increase -- but it's not."

Ohio sells bonds to private investors -- in other words, borrows money for the Clean Ohio projects -- and then repays those bonds with money from the state's general fund and tobacco taxes.

The state has spent more than $383 million on dozens of Clean Ohio projects in all but two of the state's 88 counties since the program began in 2001.

That money, matched by at least a 25 percent local contribution, has been used to preserve 26,000 acres of wildlife habitat, create 216 miles of new trails and redevelop 173 polluted, abandoned industrial sites known as brownfields, Clean Ohio campaign officials have said.

Supporters contend that the program produces jobs -- nearly 15,000 since 2001 -- and had attracted $2.6 billion in public and private investment.

Cuyahoga County and the six surrounding counties that make up Northeast Ohio have received about $85.5 million, or more than 22 percent of the funding statewide, in the first seven years of the program. This year's allocations have not yet been determined.

Among the larger local projects:

• $6 million to Painesville city and Painesville Township to clean up the former Diamond Shamrock industrial complex along the border with Fairport Harbor to make room for developer Todd Davis' sports-themed housing complex along the Grand River.

• $3 million to Cuyahoga County for the Flats East Bank Neighborhood project, which is turning unused land along the Cuyahoga River into a neighborhood with 144 housing units and 440,000 square feet of retail and office space.

• $3 million to Cleveland to buy land, tear down the former Ohio Knitting Mills and build 84,000 square feet of laboratory and loft-style office space for the MidTown Technology Center.

Local governments, public agencies and nonprofit organizations are eligible to apply for the Clean Ohio funding -- money that does not come from a tax increase. The money does not go directly to private developers.

Clean Ohio officials also say that while money goes toward the cleanup of contaminated industrial sites, none of it goes to the violators themselves.

The Clean Ohio money is essentially to be split 50-50 between "green" projects and "brown" projects -- meaning that half would go toward building parklike trails or conserving greenspace, while the other half would go toward reclaiming damaged industrial land.

"The Clean Ohio funding allows developers to choose to redevelop a polluted industrial site in an urban area rather than bulldoze over undeveloped farmland," attorney Joe Reidy said in a recent teleconference with Environment Ohio, an advocacy group. Reidy heads the brownfields-practice group at Schottenstein Zox & Dunn Co. LPA.

"Because the cost to redevelop brownfield sites is significantly more than to develop cornfields, Clean Ohio helps to fill that gap and level the playing field," he said.

Clean Ohio is one among three measures on the ballot nationwide that would fund programs to help preserve open space, said Amy Gomberg of Environment Ohio. She referred to it as "one of the most successful preservation programs in the country."

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